Today in Digital Marketing - Your Brand's Instagram Account Has Been Suspended (j/k, j/k...)
Episode Date: October 31, 2022Ghosts and goblins in the machine — Instagram is haunted by a nasty global bug. Facebook admits it has work to do after a study found its image recognition was providing ethically troublesome and do...wnright creepy targeting... Breathe easier: Another stay of execution for a big Google change... and beware those not up to speed on connected TV. ✨ GO PREMIUM! ✨ ✓ Ad-free episodes ✓ Story links in show notes ✓ Deep-dive weekend editions ✓ Better audio quality ✓ Live event replays ✓ Audio chapters ✓ Earlier release time ✓ Exclusive marketing discounts ✓ and more! Check it out: todayindigital.com/premiumfeed 📰 The TiDM Newsletter: Get It (daily or weekly)✉️ Contact Us: Email or Send Voicemail⚾ Pitch Us a Story: Fill in this form📈 Reach Marketers: Book Ad🗞️ Classified Ads: Book Now🤝 Join our Slack: todayindigital.com/slack🙂 Share: Tweet About Us • Rate and Review 🎤 Follow: LinkedIn • TikTok • FB Page/Group👨🏻💼 Follow Tod: LinkedIn • TikTok ------------------------------------🎒UPGRADE YOUR SKILLS• Inside Google Ads with Jyll Saskin Gales• Foxwell Slack Group and Courses 👍 TOOLS WE RECOMMEND• Social media mgmt: Sprout Social and Agorapulse• Marketing tools: Appsumo• Podcast recording: Riverside.FM💡 MARKETING SPOTLIGHTIf you like Today in Digital Marketing, you’ll LOVE Stacked Marketer: the free daily newsletter that gives marketers an edge on the competition in just 7 minutes a day.Covering breaking news, tips and tricks, and insights for all major marketing channels like Google, Facebook, TikTok, native ads, SEO and more.Join 32k+ marketers who read it daily. Sign up free now! ------------------------------------ Today in Digital Marketing is hosted by Tod Maffin and produced by engageQ digital on the traditional territories of the Snuneymuxw First Nation on Vancouver Island, Canada. Associate Producer: Steph Gunn. Ad Coordination: RedCircle. Production Coordinator: Sarah Guild. Theme Composer: Mark Blevis. Music rights: Source AudioSome links in these show notes may provide affiliate revenue to us.Our Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy
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It is Monday, October 31st.
Today, ghosts and goblins in the machine.
Instagram is haunted by a nasty global bug.
Also, Facebook admits it has work to do after a study found its image recognition was providing
ethically troublesome and downright creepy targeting.
Breathe easier, another stay of execution for a big Google change.
And beware those not up to speed on connected TV.
I'm Todd Maffin. Here's what you missed today in digital marketing. No, you're not losing followers and no, your account is not banned.
If you've been ghosted by Instagram, you are not alone. The platform gave social media managers
quite the scare this morning with a mysterious glitch that is still affecting millions. The
outage started earlier today.
Several users have reported that they're either unable to log in or were told their accounts had been suspended.
Some users were reporting that the app was crashing
and unusable before this morning's update.
As a result of the suspensions,
users and brand accounts are also seeing that their follower counts have plummeted.
Instagram's own account was down by over a million.
The platform confirmed that there is an ongoing issue
that is blocking users from accessing their accounts
and that it is working on a fix.
I should note that at our production deadline,
some accounts had started reporting their back online
and follower counts are increasing again.
According to a new study, ads on Facebook are segmented by race and age based on
photos regardless of whether advertisers want it or not. The study found that Facebook uses image
recognition software to classify people pictured in ads based on their race, gender, and age.
That in itself isn't surprising. We know their AI looks at images for a whole bunch of reasons.
But the study found that the image composition will play a role in who sees the ad.
And I'm not going to lie here, it's a little creepy.
For instance, researchers found that if you post an ad with a teen girl or a young woman,
Facebook will mostly show it to men over 55, regardless of what the ad is about.
It also found that white people will see fewer ads with black people in them. The study was
published by the ACM Internet Measurement Conference. It was conducted by creating ads
for job listings with pictures of people. Researchers used stock photos in some ads,
but in others, they used AI to generate synthetic images that
were identical apart from demographics. Then the researchers spent thousands of dollars running
Facebook ads and tracking which ads were shown to which users. The results were a little alarming.
80% of the audiences who saw the synthetic photos of black people were themselves black. The audience that saw photos of teenage girls was 60% male,
while older women were shown to an audience that was 60% women.
The study also found that stock images performed exactly the same
as pictures of AI-generated faces,
which shows that demographics determine the results, not other factors.
As Gizmodo noted, assuming Facebook
targeting is effective, this may not be a problem for product ads. But as one of the study's
researchers pointed out, that when it comes to advertising opportunities like jobs, housing,
credit, or education, the things that might have worked well for selling products can, of course,
have problematic societal consequences. Quoting Gizmodo, Facebook's ad targeting by race and age
may not be in advertisers' best interests either. Companies often choose the people in their ads to
demonstrate that they value diversity. They don't want fewer white people to see their ads just
because they chose a picture of a black person. Even if Facebook knows older men are more likely
to look at ads depicting young women, that doesn't mean they're more interested in the products. But there are far bigger consequences at play. If algorithms are
using crude demographic assumptions to decide who sees ads for housing, jobs, or other opportunities,
that can reinforce stereotypes and enshrine discrimination, unquote. In response,
Meta said the research highlights an industry-wide concern and that the platform is, quote,
building technology designed to help address these issues, unquote. transition to Google Analytics 4 by postponing the kill date for its UA360 platform from October
of next year, 2023, to July of 2024. Google Analytics 4 is designed to help businesses
collect customer data across web and mobile applications. It will eventually replace
Universal Analytics and UA360. The tech giant said the delay is to give enterprise customers
more time to transition to
GA4 and in the meantime will focus its efforts and investments on GA4 to deliver a, quote,
solution built to adapt to a changing ecosystem, unquote. The company added that because of this,
it will be shifting away from UA360 and focusing more on GA4 next year. As a result, performance will likely degrade
in Universal Analytics 360 until it is eventually killed off.
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Has mobile advertising finally met its match? A new survey has found that 98% of senior brand marketers
think that connected TV advertising
will be bigger than mobile advertising,
with a quarter of respondents saying
this will happen in two to three years.
The study also found that nearly two-thirds of businesses
are already running direct response campaigns
on connected TV, sometimes referred to as CTV.
According to brands, the top reasons to advertise on CTV
include engaging with new audiences, increasing engagement levels and driving higher lifetime
values. And apparently half of North American consumers have downloaded a mobile app after
watching a CTV ad, while the majority of consumers say they are likely to do so using a QR code.
Another win for the format is that 86% of consumers
are willing to see ads on CTV,
especially if they are relevant to them.
On average, consumers are happy to watch
one and a half ads within 30 minutes of content,
but that jumps 220% to nearly six ads
if they are relevant to the viewer or are entertaining.
Only two out of five said they would stop
watching connected TV if there were too many ads. And finally, the world's richest YouTube creator
says his account is worth $1.5 billion. And he might be right. With 107 million subscribers,
Mr. Beast is the fifth most subscribed creator on YouTube.
He's mostly famous for doing nice things for people on camera, like giving away a whole bunch
of money, giving away a private island. Aside from ad dollars brought in from his followings
across content platforms, he's also launched some lucrative consumer brands, like a restaurant chain
called MrBeast Burgers, and a snack brand dubbed Feastables.
Now he wants to raise $150 million in a funding round for his influencer empire and various other
ventures, which would value the businesses together at $1.5 billion. Incidentally, I am
seeking a $1.4 billion valuation for pretty much everything I own. So much better business deal, I'd say.
I don't want to brag or anything, but our house is on the A-list of Halloween stops.
Or so I'm told by parents in our neighborhood anyway.
I do this kind of a game show thing.
I dress up.
I've got fancy lights and game show music and a big spin wheel, like one of those gambling wheels.
You know, tick-a-tick-a-tick-a-tick-a-tick-a-tick-a-tick-a-tick-a-tick.
And then it stops on a particular thing.
And almost every space just says more candy.
So they kind of get double candy.
But there is a space for a prize.
There's two spaces for prizes, actually.
There's a small prize.
And then there's one sliver that says big prize.
And these are big prizes.
Of the 72 kids who came last year, yes, they do keep track,
only three of them landed on that spot.
And so this year I've got a solar-powered robot toy that they can assemble,
a crystal-growing kit.
There's sort of a princess sticker pop-up book toy thing.
Anyway, it's always super fun to have them land on it and get super excited.
So I'm told by the parents in the neighborhood that we are the first stop of many kids.
So I hope we have enough candy to hold out.
I'll do a video of it and post it in our Slack community, which is another reason you should
join, by the way.
Just tap the link in the show notes or go to todayindigital.com slash Slack.
All right, that's it for today.
I'm Todd Mappin.
Thanks for listening.
See you tomorrow. And they came
by the light of the moon
Did the twist
and sung this tune
And they danced around
and around the night
The zombies came
Ha ha ha ha ha ha
Ha ha ha ha ha
Ha ha ha ha ha ha Ha ha ha ha ha Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!